Churchill Leadership Quotes

If you're going through hell, keep going

When eagles are silent, parrots begin to chatter.

To the trolls, my work is about people, leadership and change. If the scribe reminds me of Churchill, dog and stone, then I have already wasted time

The longer you look back, the farther you can look forward.

No less a bold and pugnacious figure than Winston Churchill broke down and was unable to finish his remarks at the sendoff of the British Expeditionary Force into the maelstrom of World War I in Europe.

There was, however, a difference between his mood and that of the rest of the cabinet. They felt desperate; he felt challenged.

Democracy is more vindictive than cabinets, the wars of peoples will be more terrible than those of kings.

Never confuse leadership with popularity.

Never confuse leadership with popularity.’158

It is truth, in the old saying, that is 'the daughter of time,' and the lapse of half a century has not left us many of our illusions. Churchill tried and failed to preserve one empire. He failed to preserve his own empire, but succeeded in aggrandizing two much larger ones. He seems to have used crisis after crisis as an excuse to extend his own power. His petulant refusal to relinquish the leadership was the despair of postwar British Conservatives; in my opinion this refusal had to do with his yearning to accomplish something that 'history' had so far denied him—the winning of a democratic election.

There is no worse mistake in public leadership than to hold out false hopes soon to be swept away.

The author points out that novices to total war, and this Hitler and the British press have in common, overreact to daily events and lose sight of overall strategy.

Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen. —Winston Churchill

They were following their prime minister, matching their government's mood.

There is no worse mistake in public leadership than to hold out false hopes soon to be swept away. The

It was an integral part of Churchill’s leadership code never to scapegoat subordinates.

Leadership sometimes demands more than verbiage. It requires visible acts.

To Hitler, personal and ideological loyalty was more important than professional aptitude and performance.

His finest hour was the leadership of Britain when it was most isolated, most threatened and most weak; when his own courage, determination and belief in democracy became at one with the nation.

This was the year in which Churchill became Churchill, the cigar-smoking bulldog we all think we know, when he made his greatest speeches and showed the world what courage and leadership looked like.

In every age there comes a time when a leader must come forward to meet the needs of the hour. Therefore, there is no potential leader who does not have the opportunity to make a positive difference in society.

ONE OF THE MOST DISTINCTIVE aspects of Churchill’s approach to leadership was his ability to switch tracks in an instant and focus earnestly on things that any other prime minister would have found trivial. Depending on one’s perspective, this was either an endearing trait or a bedevilment.

There is no worse mistake in public leadership than to hold out false hopes soon to be swept away… people can face peril or misfortune with fortitude and buoyancy, but they bitterly resent being deceived or finding that those responsible for their affairs are themselves dwelling in a fool’s paradise.

Maybe a knowledge of literature and history was of no immediate benefit to a soldier in the ranks during the second world war; without it, however, it would have been impossible for Churchill to exert the kind of leadership that distinguished him, and which aroused even in the most uneducated the sense that far more was at stake than he could easily define.

Winston was tired but cheerful. We spoke of the dark days of the summer. I told him that Portal and I had confessed to each other that in our hearts we had both despaired at one time. He said, “Yes, normally I wake up buoyant to face the new day. Then I awoke with dread in my heart.”’180 Yet nothing any of those men did or said in public, to the press, in Parliament or to their own staffs, or even to their wives, let slip for one minute that they had the slightest doubt in ultimate victory. It was the quintessence of leadership.

Other disappointments went unlisted. Neither Roosevelt nor Churchill had been effusive in his praise at Casablanca, and Eisenhower felt unappreciated. “His work and leadership had been taken rather for granted,” Butcher wrote on January 17. The “absence of clear-cut words of thanks from the president or prime minister showed that they had their noses to the political winds.” Harry Hopkins told Butcher at Casablanca that taking Tunisia would prove Eisenhower “one of the world’s greatest generals,” but without such a victory his fate was uncertain. “Such is the life of generals,” Butcher mused.

In his essay on Clemenceau in Great Contemporaries, Churchill had commended the way the Frenchman was ‘fighting, fighting all the way’ through life.254 Over the next five months Churchill had to fight the Government whips, the Prime Minister, the press (especially The Times), Conservative Central Office, his backbench colleagues, the Security Services and his own constituency association. In some parliamentary divisions he led a party of three, and sometimes two. Yet in that same desolate period he showed the greatest moral courage of his life, and laid the foundations of his future wartime leadership.

In time of war, under the banner of an enemy recognisable as such, a foreigner from a camp outside the lines, the imperial idea grew strong in confidence and temper. The British democracy rallied to the call of a strong leadership, and it was not just in rhetorical enthusiasm but with considerable personal satisfaction that Churchill hailed the year 1940-1 as the British people's 'finest hour'. He, with other imperialists, was delighted by the fact that, when it came to the sticking-place, it was the old-fashioned loyalty of the reactionary British Empire to all that was symbolised by allegiance to Crown and country that came forward to save European civilisation from utter overthrow by German tyranny...The days of showing the flag—even for only a momentary glimpse, such as wall that inhabitants of Greece and Crete and Dieppe had of it—had returned. The Empire was the Empire once more, and to 10, Downing Street returned that imperial control that two generations of Dominion opinion had combined to condemn as sinister.

If anything, it made his appointment all the more exquisite. In the fading light, Inspector Thompson saw tears begin to slip down Churchill’s cheeks. Thompson, too, found himself near tears. — LATE THAT NIGHT CHURCHILL lay in bed, alive with a thrilling sense of challenge and opportunity. “In my long political experience,” he wrote, “I had held most of the great offices of State, but I readily admit that the post which had now fallen to me was the one I liked the best.” Coveting power for power’s sake was a “base” pursuit, he wrote, adding, “But power in a national crisis, when a man believes he knows what orders should be given, is a blessing.” He felt great relief. “At last I had the authority to give directions over the whole scene. I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial….Although impatient for the morning I slept soundly and had no need for cheering dreams. Facts are better than dreams.” Despite the doubts he had expressed to Inspector Thompson, Churchill brought to No. 10 Downing Street a naked confidence that under his leadership Britain would win the war, even though any objective appraisal would have said he did not have a chance. Churchill

Well before the end of the 20th century however print had lost its former dominance. This resulted in, among other things, a different kind of person getting elected as leader. One who can present himself and his programs in a polished way, as Lee Quan Yu you observed in 2000, adding, “Satellite television has allowed me to follow the American presidential campaign. I am amazed at the way media professionals can give a candidate a new image and transform him, at least superficially, into a different personality. Winning an election becomes, in large measure, a contest in packaging and advertising. Just as the benefits of the printed era were inextricable from its costs, so it is with the visual age. With screens in every home entertainment is omnipresent and boredom a rarity. More substantively, injustice visualized is more visceral than injustice described. Television played a crucial role in the American Civil rights movement, yet the costs of television are substantial, privileging emotional display over self-command, changing the kinds of people and arguments that are taken seriously in public life. The shift from print to visual culture continues with the contemporary entrenchment of the Internet and social media, which bring with them four biases that make it more difficult for leaders to develop their capabilities than in the age of print. These are immediacy, intensity, polarity, and conformity. Although the Internet makes news and data more immediately accessible than ever, this surfeit of information has hardly made us individually more knowledgeable, let alone wiser, as the cost of accessing information becomes negligible, as with the Internet, the incentives to remember it seem to weaken. While forgetting anyone fact may not matter, the systematic failure to internalize information brings about a change in perception, and a weakening of analytical ability. Facts are rarely self-explanatory; their significance and interpretation depend on context and relevance. For information to be transmuted into something approaching wisdom it must be placed within a broader context of history and experience. As a general rule, images speak at a more emotional register of intensity than do words. Television and social media rely on images that inflamed the passions, threatening to overwhelm leadership with the combination of personal and mass emotion. Social media, in particular, have encouraged users to become image conscious spin doctors. All this engenders a more populist politics that celebrates utterances perceived to be authentic over the polished sound bites of the television era, not to mention the more analytical output of print. The architects of the Internet thought of their invention as an ingenious means of connecting the world. In reality, it has also yielded a new way to divide humanity into warring tribes. Polarity and conformity rely upon, and reinforce, each other. One is shunted into a group, and then the group polices once thinking. Small wonder that on many contemporary social media platforms, users are divided into followers and influencers. There are no leaders. What are the consequences for leadership? In our present circumstances, Lee's gloomy assessment of visual media's effects is relevant. From such a process, I doubt if a Churchill or Roosevelt or a de Gaulle can emerge. It is not that changes in communications technology have made inspired leadership and deep thinking about world order impossible, but that in an age dominated by television and the Internet, thoughtful leaders must struggle against the tide.

The uncontrollable momentum of war, the inadequacy of unity and leadership among Allies, the tides of national passion, nearly always force improvident action upon Governments or Commanders

At this point, the British Empire was in its death throes, and Britain was attempting to cling to at least some of its empire with all of its might. In addition to countries like Iran, Britain in the early 1950s was also attempting to subjugate countries like Kenya, where Britain would attempt to wipe out the rebellious Kikuyu ethnic group. As has recently been exposed, the United Kingdom, under Churchill’s leadership, imprisoned 1.5 million Kikuyu in “a network of detention camps,” much like Stalin’s gulags, where they “suffered forced labour, disease, starvation, torture, rape and murder.”14 Possibly hundreds of thousands of Kikuyu died in what some, including historian Caroline Elkins, have termed Britain’s genocidal campaign against them.15 Ironically, while Churchill decried Stalin’s gulags, and warned of the USSR’s “Iron Curtain” descending upon Eastern Europe, he had no qualms about his own gulags in Africa.

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The price of greatness is responsibility. Winston Churchill, former British Prime Minister

Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities … because it is the quality which guarantees all others,” Churchill said.

At the time I was reading everything I could get my hands on about generals, samurai, shoguns, along with biographies of my three main heroes—Churchill, Kennedy, and Tolstoy. I had no love of violence, but I was fascinated by leadership, or lack thereof, under extreme conditions. War is the most extreme of conditions. But business has its warlike parallels. Someone somewhere once said that business is war without bullets, and I tended to agree.

To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often, said Winston Churchill.

Winston Churchill’s great remark that “success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.

In 1940, under Churchill’s inspired, indomitable, incomparable leadership, the Empire had stood alone against the truly evil imperialism of Hitler. Even if it did not last for the thousand years that Churchill hopefully suggested it might, this was indeed the British Empire’s ‘finest hour’. Yet what made it so fine, so authentically noble, was that the Empire’s victory could only ever have been Pyrrhic. In the end, the British sacrificed her Empire to stop the Germans, Japanese and Italians from keeping theirs. Did not that sacrifice alone expunge all the Empire’s other sins?

To reform a military system always demands reformers of ruthless will and high professional talent. Yet it demands even more – a favourable political climate.

You turn the blind eye – you, and all your timid minions in the House, all those who would try and talk their way out of the labyrinth. Every creature out there who would sell their birthrights for a quiet life – the pacifist intellectuals, the wishful thinkers, the dull masses who wait for leadership and who will perish for want of it – you all resolutely refuse to open your eyes and recognise the terrible truth that stares you in the face. Because you do not want to believe it. Which is that the head of a great nation – like so many who have usurped such positions in the past – is nothing but a criminal, a tyrant, a psychopath. For whatever fathomless reasons the psychoanalysts might find. And as such he has no scruples, and only one ambition. To go on conquering, and murdering, and coercing until he is master of all within his vision. Which means first his own people. Then his neighbours. Then the world.

Whatever it did to Churchill, Gallipoli saw the birth of a nation, or rather two. By no remote consequence of the campaign, Mustafa Kemal would become Kemal Ataturk, while the rump of the Ottoman Empire became a Turkish national state under his leadership. And Australia would change also. The headstone of one Australian infantryman bears the words, chosen by his parents, ‘When day break, duty done for King and Country,’ but that was not how later generations of Australians would feel. ‘From a place you’ve never heard of, comes a story you’ll never forget’ was the quaint slogan advertising the 1981 Australian movie Gallipoli, which helped launch Mel Gibson’s career, but every Australian has heard of it.

I remember that we had a discussion in the war about unity of command, and that Mr. Lloyd George said, "It is not a question of one general being better than another, but of one general being better than two.

Weakness is not treason, though it may be equally disastrous.

At the time I was reading everything I could get my hands on about generals, samurai, shoguns, along with biographies of my three main heroes Churchill, Kennedy, and Tölstoy. I had no love of violence, but I was fascinated by leadership, or lack thereof, under extreme conditions. War is the most extreme of conditions. But business has its warlike parallels. Someone somewhere once said that business is war without bullets, and I tended to agree.

7. Our task, as the Minister of Supply rightly reminds us, is indeed formidable when the gigantic scale of German military and aviation equipment is considered. This war is not however a war of masses of men hurling masses of shells at each other. It is by devising new weapons, and above all by scientific leadership, that we shall best cope with the enemy’s superior strength.

Writing is the handmaiden of leadership; Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill rode to glory on the back of the strong declarative sentence

General Sherman and cable entrepreneur Ted Turner exemplify how the symptoms of bipolar disorder can enhance creativity. The careers of Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill show the special relationship between depression and realism. So too do Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.; their lives also highlight the strong link between depression and empathy.

His supreme achievement in 1940 was to mobilize Britain's warriors, to shame into silence its doubters, and to stir the passions of the nation, so that for a season the British nation faced the world united and exalted. The "Dunkirk spirit" was not spontaneous. It was created by the rhetoric and bearing of one man, displaying powers that will define political political leadership for the rest of time.

If you read enough leadership books you will realise that to succeed you need to become an improbable mix of Nelson Mandela, Lord Nelson, Machiavelli, Churchill, Genghis Khan and Mother Teresa all put together. Some bosses think they are already that good: they are normally bosses who are well worth avoiding.

If the day comes when we can obey the orders of our courts only when we personally approve of them, the end of the American system will not be far off.

Neurosyphilis isn’t genetic. Yet we’ll see that Lord Randolph’s son Winston had a different mental illness, as did Winston’s daughter Diana, who had a major depressive episode in 1952 and committed suicide in 1963 by barbiturate overdose (despite being active in suicide prevention efforts). Churchill’s first cousin, called “Sunny,” also suffered severe depressive episodes throughout his life. Thus we find a familial

Why not just exclude the mentally ill from positions of power? As we’ve seen, such a stance would have deprived humanity of Lincoln, Churchill, Roosevelt, and Kennedy. But there’s an even more fundamental reason not to restrict leadership roles to the mentally healthy: they make bad leaders in times of crisis—just when we need good leadership most.

In all great business very large errors are excused or even unperceived, but in definite and local matters small mistakes are punished out of all proportion.” This is one reason politicians are risk-averse, and why modern government administration seeks to minimize risk and avoid failure through a mindless bureaucratic process that delivers mostly mediocrity.

In 1209 a Crusade for a different purpose was set on foot, and all temporal forces at the disposal of Rome were directed upon the Albigenses, under the leadership of Philip of France. At this time the burning of heretics and other undesirables, which had been practised sporadically in France, received the formal sanction of law.

There is no worse mistake in public leadership than to hold out false hopes soon to be swept away. —WINSTON S. CHURCHILL,

Months earlier, he had begun to dream about the postwar world, and if he kept Churchill at arm’s length it was partly because his vision did not include the restoration of colonial empires. Surely he had spoken from the heart in telling the prime minister, “It is fun to be in the same decade with you.” Yet there was also cold conviction in Roosevelt’s observation to his son Elliott: “Britain is on the decline.” America was ascendant, and Roosevelt had reason to hope that his countrymen possessed the stamina to remake a better world: a forthcoming Roper opinion poll, secretly slipped to the White House on Thursday, revealed that more than three-quarters of those surveyed agreed that the United States should play a larger global role after the war. Nearly as many believed that the country should “plan to help other nations get on their feet,” and more than half concurred that Americans should “take an active part in some sort of an international organization with a court and police force strong enough to enforce its decisions.” The president found it equally heartening that 70 percent approved of his war leadership and two-thirds favored him for reelection in 1944 if the world was still at war.

Success is not final, failure is not fatal; it is the courage to continue that counts.

The Army was to be subordinated to the supreme leadership of the Fuehrer. Every soldier took the oath, not, as formerly, to the Constitution, but to the person of Adolf Hitler. The